By Mirren Bodanis

Editor-in-Chief

HII!

We’re so back! A new year at Dawson has begun! If you’ve read The Plant before, thank you for your loyalty. If this is your first time, welcome! We’re Dawson’s 100% independent student newspaper, renown for our diverse topics, biting coverage of geopolitics, upsetting the school administration, and most of all the crossword! I hope we make a good first impression.

As much as Dawson Confessions likes to make it look like first years are the devil incarnate, I think September can be a crazy time for everyone, as Returning can be just as terrifying as Arriving. For every aspect of this yellow-bricked maze of experience you’re already familiar with, there’s an infernal CÉGEP demon that’s already expecting something of you. It’s my 5th semester here, my 3rd at The Plant, and never have I felt more like a small blind mole desperately clawing for the hole where their family is waiting for them to bring back the worms they believed I could capture but now it’s suddenly occurring to me that since moles are blind I don’t even know what my mole family looks like so how am I supposed to recognize them, let alone a small dirt hole in this 30 acre cornfield how can i ever….

So here’s my advice for you.

Trust yourself.

In high school, I felt like I could never trust anything. High school, like most untrustworthy things, is something that feels like it happens to you. Everything was crazy, everything was weird, it was impossible to tell when someone was being a weirdo or if I was the weirdo for thinking that. The halloween dance, online school, Emma’s pool parties and Mr. Nitram’s science class, and God don’t get me started on the men’s locker room (eek! I still haven’t resolved my gender problems. But they were the weirdos in that context, for sure…) If at Dawson I’m a mole, then at Beaconsfield High School I was a mole perpetually strapped to a rollercoaster for 5 years non-stop as mandated by law. It pulled me through Secondary at alarming speed. Careening through 6 classes every day, an exhilarating pull coming from every which way. The best days were ones when I could make myself fall into the pulls that made my stomach flutter, and resist the ones that made my spine thrash & pinch against the hard plastic seat. Dodging, weaving, resisting, indulging, pushing & pulling in my freak mole body.

It’s impossible to trust a place that expects that of you, ripping and rocking you around. Maybe it’s exhilarating, maybe it’s traumatic, but it withholds any time to just exist and smell the soil. High school was about dodging the bad impulses and indulging in the okay ones, until you’ve made it to prom and you can walk home drunk at 5am and finally take a nap.

CÉGEP is different. You’re not trapped on the rollercoaster. You can pick your classes, make your schedule, join clubs, make clubs, and drop classes! It doesn’t matter whether or not you can trust Dawson, because it’s basically up to you how you experience it. So don’t trust Dawson, trust yourself.

Listening to even my favourite professors hasn’t provided me half the education I got from listening to my body. Not just when I was hungry, or tired, but truly listening. Do I actually like these people? Do I feel happy when I worry about this class so much? Do I feel good when I listen to this prof’s mediocre feedback? Will I feel better if I only take 4 classes? How does it make me feel? Empowered, euphoric, exhausted, stressed, dissatisfied, at home? Probably a combination.

Listen to yourself, because the better you can do that the better choices you can make. Then it gets easier to have the CÉGEP experience you want, and easier to grow and learn more, and easier to trust that you’ll have a great time because you can always trust yourself. Often, it might be shitty, and stressful, and unfair, and maybe you made a mistake or the people around you are just evil. But you can trust that you’ll come out of it with a dramatically expanded knowledge of where to find worms to sustain your mole-family and the surrounding rodent community, allowing you and it to grow and bloom together in a way never possible in the capitalist system because it’s inaccessible to moles, who are blind and that’s okay. If things aren’t working you can always turn back, and change your mole mind at any moment. That’s okay, exciting, and that’s how you become even more beautiful than you already are now.

The crossword’s on the last page, but it might be cool if you read what’s in between here and there.

Love you!

-Mirren